>> I've got Madhav Mekala here with me, commerce architect at PepsiCo Madhav welcome to the program. >> Thank you Lisa. >> So we're going to be talking about the solution that you implemented that helped with the global supply chain. So let's talk first about your role, commerce architect. Help me understand that a little bit better. >> So Frito-Lay PepsiCo is pretty big. It's a conglomerate of multiple product lines. So I worked for Frito-Lay, which is basically all the salty snacks and then we have a Quaker products as well in our portfolio. So I oversee all the architecture for all the commercial IoT solutions in the FNA portfolio. >> Got it all the commercial lines. So we all know the last 18 months major challenges with the global supply chain component shortages, we've seen a huge increase in the cost of raw materials, limited labor, but you guys actually started to tackle this challenge before the pandemic happened. So talk to me about the catalyst that PepsiCo, what you saw to modernize field service and supply chain application. >> Yeah, so we have a pretty old system that our field force, our frontline users are using. So we have a world-class supply chain system where we go into the stores and place orders and deliver products throughout the U.S. And then we penetrate, I think, more than 95% of the households with our products. So we need to have a robust supply chain as well as a good frontline sales application, to be able to manage the orders, and be able to deliver the products, right? So the system that we have is almost 20 year old system running on a very outdated technology. We've been trying to replace that for a while now. And finally, we started this early last year to completely replace the solution with a brand new IPhone based app. And then that gives our frontline the ability to go place orders, do deliveries to retail execution in the store like check-in check-out, bill displays. There are so much functionality that our RSRs or frontline users do in the stores and this app enables them to do much more efficiently. >> And we're going to break into that, but you mentioned you had a 20 year old technology. Talk to me about some of the challenges that that likely presented to those frontline workers. >> Yeah. I mean, there are multiple challenges for one, we cannot enable new business models. So business wants to come up with new ideas for, to be able to implement in the field, but with our system being so old, it's so hard to implement anything on that one. And then even the physical device is not scaling. We had a lot of memory issues, so it's time for it to kind of retire, but also the technology we use the 3G technology is retiring pretty soon at the next year. So we were definitely need to move to a new solution. And this is one of the must things we have to do right away. So that's where we started the project and we are in pilot phase right now. >> What would have been some of those negative consequences, had you not undertaken the effort? I imagine from a competitive perspective, knowing how much competition is out there, what would some of those challenges have been if this had persisted? >> Yeah, so one is the stability of the application, right? So the frontline users have to spend more time because the app is not stable, the current one. So that reduces the efficiency of our Salesforce. Right? And then on the other hand, we also not able to put new features or new business models enable new business models on top of the existing ones. So we are losing out on some of them because of our outdated system. So that's one thing we want to solve with the new one. >> So this is really critical to really evolve PepsiCo's business at, at its baseline, right? >> That's true. Yeah. It is very critical application that we are building and this will enable us to do a lot more things in future. And we can come up with new ideas, including like virtual reality or connecting to multiple systems. There are so many new ideas that we want to enable once we have this in place. >> Awesome. Talk to me about why Couchbase and then tell us more about, you started to talk a little bit about the solution, but let's go ahead and dig in and unpack the actual solution that you implemented. >> Yeah. So this is, eh, we call it an ERP and a mobile device because it has so much functionality as a company Frito-Lay, we have been over a hundred years in this business, right? We have so many optimized process that we have that kind of led to some digility in the system because we want to do in a particular way, because that's the best way to do it as part of our business process. So what we're trying to do here is take that business process and also provide an app that will enhance it and then connect to more, more systems. So that's what we are trying to do here. And then on top of that one, we will replace all the existing peripherals that we use with the new technology, like Bluetooth and all so that, they are much more faster and they slot more productive for our frontline force. >> Sounds like a lot of sales folks are going to to be a lot more productive. Talk to me about where Couchbase is as an integral component to this new system. >> Yeah. So one of the key requirements for this app is offline mode. What that means is one of our other salesforce who go from our system from our DC to other stores, should be able to run the whole day without any major disruption, even if they're not connected, let's say because when they go into big stores, typically there's no connection there all metal boxes. So the cellular reception is not there, but most of our work that we do from our frontline is within the store. So it has to be a full offline where we have to have all the data within the device and we should be able to place orders, create inventory that records or adjust inventory, and then create invoices. All the majority of the things that we do are in the store and they should be able to do without the connection. So that's where we explored multiple options and kind of zeroed in on Couchbase where we bring all the data into Couchbase database on the device and then sync it when there is connection, but there's no connection, we still have all the data on the device and we can go do all of our duties in the stores without any issues, even if it is not connected. >> So the sales folks can be in the stores with their mobile device, doing all the transactions that they need to do with the stores, regardless of if there's connectivity. Talk to me about what happens when they get back to connectivity in that and the Couchbase database sync. >> Yeah. And the other big thing we want is instant connect. I mean, when there's connectivity, we want instant sync with the backend, right? If there's new data that comes, we need that in the device. At the same time, if I place an order, I want to send it back immediately to our backend systems so that our fulfillment starts for those. So that's very critical when we have a lot of cutoff times for our orders. So we need order as soon as we've placed to be going into the backend systems. So what happens when it gets connected, as soon as the sales folks come out of the store or when, within the story they could connectivity the Couchbased technology that we are using using the sync gateway immediately syncs the data back and forth if there's any new data that's available. So that is key for us in this particular app. >> So our transactions happening in real time or near real time. >> Yeah. So the data flow happens in real time when there's connectivity, but when it is not connected still, it doesn't have any issue with the actual transactions with the RSR that can go complete anything that. >> Got it. Okay. So there's no impediment there. In fact, it's a productivity enhancer. It sounds like for all of those sales folks out on the frontline. Tell us so millions of documents go through the system, tens of billions of dollars. Talk to me about the volume of data and the actual monetary value that's traversing the system. >> Yeah. It's huge, again, this is kind of the lifeline of the company. The sales are always the life of any company, right? So most of the sales for Frito-Lay goes through our system and we're talking anywhere between hundreds of thousands of documents that flow through back and forth between the Couch between the device and the server. So there's a lot of master data that comes like products price from customers, all that information that comes from the backend to the device and all the orders inventory and everything that gets created on the device gets flown sync back to the server. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's a very complex system. And also from the volume perspective, it's huge. So we had to build a massive infrastructure on the backend to be able to handle all this. One of the key feature is again, we have this massive data that we need to sync to the devices, but each device should only get the portion of the data that they want because a particular Salesforce only goes to a small set of 20 stores, let's say. So the data that we sync to that device is only for those 20 stores. So that's the key here. So Couchbase allows us to do that. The Couchbase sync, where we can subset the data into different portions and only send the data that is relevant for a particular device. >> So then from a, from a latency perspective, it must be pretty low latency, pretty fast to be able to get this data back to the device and to the sales person that is in the middle of a transaction. >> Yes. I mean, it's pretty, the sink is very fast. The Couchbase sync, especially user's web sockets. And we do continuous replicators where if I complete an order, the next instant it's on the server. So it's, it's we observed the speeds improved a lot. So the technology that we are using uses syncs for a long, long time compared to Couchbase, and that's another productivity gain for our Salesforce. >> What were some of the differentials? You mentioned some of the technology requirements that PepsiCo had in rearchitecting, the infrastructure, but what were some of the key technology differentiators that really made Couchbase stand out as the obvious choice? >> Yeah, so we, when we started this project, we all know the sink is the key for this whole project, because we thought the data going back and forth, we cannot really build a robust offline app. So we looked at multiple options, other providers that are doing the sync. And we also looked at building our own sink, in-house using APIs, but then we did lots of performance testing across all the options that we had at that time. And then Couchbase came above all of them pretty handily. So obviously we can coach base takes care of the sync, and then we can focus on our business process. So we can go build all the business process and not worry about how to build the syncing engine. And then that is itself a big effort. So that's what Couchbase provided us saying a instant sync engine. And then we were able to focus more on our, the app applicants, the frontline application, the sensor application. >> And those business processes. Let's talk about some of the business outcomes. We've mentioned a few already in our conversation, increased in productivity, the sales forces increased in that as well. But I imagine there's a lot of benefits for the end-user customer in terms of being able to get the transactions completed faster. What are some of those positive business outcomes that PepsiCo is seeing as a result of implementing Couchbase? >> Yeah. So you hit on a couple of them that the sync times are definitely a big factor where that will directly give more time for the sales folks to go either go to most stores, or even if they go to the existing stores, they can do more, spend more time with the customer merchandising and making sure everything is correct. So that's one, also the new app users connect with a lot of new peripherals that are not available on the previous platform. Also, the, our folks are very enthusiastic about using a new app, right? So it's like coming into the 21st century for them using such an old lab for a long time. So a lot of things that they see, they can see the images of the bags while ordering, which was not a feature earlier. Some of them are small, but they make a huge impact on our users. So, yeah, I mean, and then this is just a start that we are doing. And then once we are able to completely implement this one, we have a lot more going into, in future. I was just talking about, we can do virtual reality or show them how to sell using virtual reality. We can show a display to a store manager saying, 'Hey, I want to put a display here. And this is how it looks,' they can show it on the phone directly, than just explaining and showing some paper images. So there's a lot of possibilities. >> A lot of improvements to the customer experience. It sounds like, it sounds like adoption is quite high for your folks who are used to 20 year old technology, probably being very excited that they have a modern app. But talk to me a little bit about the appetite of the organization to continue modernizing the application infrastructure and presuming going from older technology to that 21st century, like you talked about. >> Yeah. So in other parts, we are already modernized some of these. So we have been on the journey for the last four, five years building multiple digital platforms. So one of the examples I can give is when COVID hit, there's a lot of disruption for everybody, for the consumers, so they are not able to find the products in the stores, a lot people are afraid to go to the stores to even buy products. So we reacted very quickly and opened a consumer website called snacks.com, which Pepsi never sold it to consumer directly. We always go through our stores, but the first time we open the consumer channel and Couchbase powered some of it for the backend purpose. So this is not a mobile app, it's just a desktop app, but we already have been on the digital transmission journey, even before we quickly turn into COVID for the snacks.com. And similarly, we are, doing this for our retail execution, portion of it using this project. So, and then we'll be continuing to do this going forward to enable a lot of functionality for I mean, for all of our sales, as well as supply chain and other systems, so that we can be more efficient. We can be more elastic saying if there is more demand, our backend should be able to handle all that, which was not the case before. So now we've built a state of the art backend system on cloud. So there's a lot of transmission, digital transmission going on within PepsiCo. And I'm really proud to be part of this project so that we took this to the next level. And then this is just a start. We can do a lot more. >> Right? This is just the beginning. That sounds like a great transformation for a historied company that we all, everybody knows PepsiCo and all of its products. But it sounds like when the pandemic hit, you had the infrastructure in place to be able to pivot quickly to launch that direct to consumer, which of course consumers, patience has been quite thin in the last year and a half. Talk to me a little bit about the impact to the overall organization as a result of being able to, to get more direct with those consumers. >> Yeah. So till now, again, we are the business model is we sell to the stores and then go customer. So we'd never get a direct sense of what consumer liking is. I mean, we get through some surveys and stuff, but we don't have a direct channel to the consumer, which this particular project enabled us snacks.com. So we know the consumer behavior, how they buying patterns, browsing patterns, which ones they like and including with geography and all so we learned a lot from the consumer behavior point of view for the project. And then we kept on enhancing. So one new thing we introduced was called Multipack where the consumers can come and pick, make their own Multipacks basically. They can say, okay, I need these many of this particular product, this particular product and make their Multipack and we ship them the customized Multipack. And it was, such a huge hit that we are not able to even fulfill them so much demand was there for that one, so we had to revamp and then get back. And now it's a huge thing on all the snacks.com platform. So all of this is possible because we had a digital platform underneath that supports this kind of innovation. So the new business models are just coming to life in within weeks or even few months and that's what we will be trying to do with the new platform that we're building for this app as well, where we'll bring in lot of new business models on top of we have already. >> Excellent, a lot of transformation it sounds like at PepsiCo in the last couple of years, I love the customization, that personalization route that you're going and I think that's going to be a huge hit for consumers. And as you said, there's a lot of demand , Madhav thank you for joining me today, talking about how you are modernizing the field service and supply chain application, the impact it's making for end users for your customers and for the sales folks. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much Lisa. >> From McCalla. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this Cube conversation.

>>I've got Mada Mykola here with me, commerce architect at PepsiCo Mada. Welcome to the program, >>Lisa. >>So we're going to be talking about the solution that you implemented, um, that helped with the global supply chain. So let's talk though, first about your role commerce architect. Help me understand that a little bit better. >>So Frito, uh, PepsiCo is pretty big. It's a conglomerate of multiple product lines. So I worked for Frito-Lay, which is basically all the salty snacks. And then we have, uh, the Quaker products as well in our portfolio. So I oversee all the architecture for all the commercial IOT solutions, uh, in the CFNA portfolio. >>Got it all the commercial lines. So we all know the last 18 months major challenges with the global supply chain component shortages. We've seen a huge increase in the cost of raw materials, um, limited labor, but you guys actually started to tackle this challenge before the pandemic happened. So talk to me about the catalyst that PepsiCo, what you saw to modernize field service and supply chain application. >>Yeah, so we have a pretty old system that our field force, our frontline users are using. So we have a world-class supply chain system where we go into the stores and place orders and deliver products, the us, and then we penetrate, I think, more than 95% of the households with our products. So we need to have a robust supply chain as well as a good frontline sales application, to be able to manage the orders and be able to deliver the products. Right? So the system that we have is almost 20 year old system running on a video data technology. There've been trying to replace that for a while now. And finally, we started this, uh, early last year to completely replace the solution with a brand new iPhone based app. Uh, and then that gives our frontline the ability to go place orders, do deliveries to retail execution in the store, like checking checkout, build displays. There are so much functionality that our RSRs or Franklin users do in the stores and this app enables them to do much more efficient. >>And we're going to break into that, but you mentioned you had a 20 year old technology. Talk to me about some of the challenges that that likely presented to those frontline workers. >>Yeah. I mean, there are multiple challenges for one, we cannot enable new business models. So business wants to come up with new ideas for, um, to be able to implement in the field, but with our system being so old, it's so hard to implement anything on that one. And then even the physical device is not scaling. We had a lot of memory issues, so it's time for it to kind of retire. And also the technology we use the 3g technologies retiring pretty soon at the next year. So we were definitely need to move to a new solution. And this is one of the most things we have to do, but right away. So that's where we started the project and we are in pilot phase right now. >>What would have been some of those negative consequences? Had you not undertaken the effort? I imagine from a competitive perspective, knowing how much competition is out there, what would some of those challenges have been if this had persisted? >>Yeah. So one is the stability of the application, right? So, uh, the frontline users have to spend more time because the app is not stable, the current one. So that reduces the efficiency of our Salesforce. Right? And then on the other hand, we also not able to put new features or new business models enable new business models on top of the existing ones. So we are losing out on some of them because of our outdated system. So that's one thing we want to solve with the new one. >>So this is really critical to really evolve PepsiCo's business at, at its baseline. Right? >>That's true. Yeah. It is very critical application that we're building and this will enable us to do a lot more things in future. And we can come up with new ideas, including like virtual reality or connecting to multiple systems. There are so many new ideas that we want to enable once we have this in place. >>Awesome. Talk to me about why Couchbase, and then tell us more about, you started to talk a little bit about the solution, but let's go ahead and dig in and unpack the actual solution that you implemented. >>Yeah. So this is, eh, we call it an ERP and a mobile device because it has so much functionality as a company three. Totally. We have been, uh, over a hundred years, uh, in this business, right. We have so many, uh, optimized process, uh, that we have that kind of led to some digital in the system because we want to do in a particular way, because that's the best way to do it as part of our business process. So what we're trying to do here is take that business process and also provide an app that will enhance it and then connect to more, more systems. So that's what we're trying to do here. And then on top of that one, we will replace all the existing peripherals that we use with the new technology, like Bluetooth and also, so that, uh, the, they are much more faster, and it's a lot more productive for our frontline force. >>Sounds like a lot of sales folks are going to be a lot more productive. Talk to me about where Couchbase is as an integral component to this new system. >>Yeah. So one of the key requirements for this app is an offline mode. What that means is, uh, one of our Salesforce who go from our system, uh, from our DC to all the stores, should be able to run the whole day without any, uh, major disruption, even if they're not connected, let's say because when they go into big stores, typically there's no connection. There are metal boxes. So the cellular reception is not there, but most of our work that we do from our frontline is within the store. So it has to be a full offline where we have to have all the data within the device, and we should be able to place artists create inventory that records or adjust inventory, and then create invoices. All the majority of the things that we do are in the store and they should be able to do without, um, the kind of connection. So that's where we explored multiple options and kind of zeroed in on Couchbase where we bring all the data into Couchbase based database on the device, and then sync it when there is connection, but there's no connection. We still have all the data on the device and we can go do all of our duties in the stores without any issues, even if it is not connected. >>So the sales folks can be in the stores with their mobile device, doing all the transactions that they need to do with the stores, regardless of if there's connectivity. Talk to me about what happens when they get back to connectivity in that and the Couchbase database sync. >>Yeah. And, uh, the other big thing we want is instant connect. I mean, when there's connectivity, we want instant sync with the backend, right? If there's new data that comes, we'll need that in the device at the same time, if I place an order, I want to send it back immediately to our backend systems for that our fulfillment stacks for those. So that's very critical when we have a lot of cutoff times for our artists. So we need artists as soon as we've placed to be going to the backend systems. So what happens when it gets connected, as soon as the sales folks come out of the store, or when within the store, they got connectivity, these codebase technology that we are using using the sync gateway immediately syncs the data back and forth. Uh, if there is any new data that's available. So that is key for us in this particular app. >>So our transactions happening in, in real time or near real time. >>Yeah. So the data flow happens in real time when this kind of gritty, but when it is not connected still, it doesn't have any issue with the actual transactions with the artists that can go complete anything that they would >>Got it. Okay. So there's no impediment there. In fact, it's a productivity enhancer. It sounds like for all of those sales folks out on the frontline TA. So, so millions of documents go through the system, tens of billions of dollars. Talk to me about the volume of data and the actual monetary value. That's traversing the system. >>Yeah. It's huge. Again, this is kind of weak. It's the lifeline of the company. The seals are always the life of any company, right? So most of the goes through our system. And, um, we're talking anywhere between hundreds of thousands of dollars that flow through back and forth, uh, between, uh, between the device and the server. So there's a lot of master data that comes like products place from customers, all that information that comes from the backend to the device and all the orders, inventory, and everything that gets created on the device gets flown back to the subtler. So yeah, I mean, it's, it's a very complex system. And also from the volume perspective, it's huge. So we had to build a massive infrastructure on the backend to be able to handle all this. One of the key feature is again, we have this massive data that we need to sync to the devices, but each device should only get the portion of the data that they want because a particular Salesforce only goes to a small set of 20 stores, let's say. So the data that we seem to that device is only for those 20 stores. So that's the key here. So Couchbase allows us to do that. The codebase sync, where we can subset the data into different portions and only send the data that is relevant for a particular device. >>So then from a, from a latency perspective, it must be pretty low latency, pretty fast to be able to get this data back to the device and to the sales person that is in the middle of a transaction. >>Yes. Uh, I mean, it's pretty, the sink is very fast. The Cosby's sink, especially user's web sockets. And we do continuous replicators where if I complete an order, the next instant it's on the stairwell. So it's, it's we observed the speeds improve a lot. So the technology that we are using users are things for a long, long time compared to code based. And that's another productivity gain for our Salesforce. >>What were some of the differentials? You mentioned some of the technology requirements that PepsiCo had in rearchitecting, the infrastructure, but what were some of the key technology differentiators that really made Couchbase stand out as the obvious choice? >>Yeah, so we, when we started this project, we all know the sink is the key for this whole project, because we thought that data going back and forth, we cannot really build a robust, um, uh, offline app. So we looked at multiple, uh, options, other providers that are doing the sink. And we also looked at building our own sink. Uh, in-house using API APIs, but then we did lots of, uh, performance testing across all the, uh, options that we had at that time. And then Ottawa cost base came above. All of them are pretty handle it. So obviously we can coach base takes care of the sink, and then we can focus on our business process. So we can go build all the business process and not worry about how we build a single. And then that is itself a big effort. So that's what caught me is prior to seeing instant sync engine. And then we were able to focus more on our, uh, the app application, the frontline application, the sales application, >>And those business processes. Let's talk about some of the business outcomes. We've mentioned a few already in our conversation, increased in productivity. The sales forces increased in that as well, but I imagine there's a lot of benefits for the end-user customer in terms of being able to get the transactions completed faster. What are some of those positive business outcomes that PepsiCo is seeing as a result of implementing Couchbase? >>Yeah. So you hit on a couple of them when the sink times are definitely a big factor with that will directly give more time for the sales folks to go either go to most stores or even they go to the existing stores, they can do more, spend more time with the customer merchandising and making sure everything is correct. So that's one also the new app users, uh, connect with a lot of new peripherals that are not available on the previous platform. Um, also the, uh, our folks are very, uh, enthusiastic about using a new app, right? So it's like coming into the 21st century for them using such an old lab for a long time. So a lot of things that they see, they can see the images of the bags while ordering, which was not a feature earlier. Some of them are small, but they make a huge impact on our users. >>Um, so yeah, I mean, and then this is just a start that we are doing. And then once we are able to completely implement this one, we have a lot more going into, in future. I was just talking about, we can do virtual reality or show them how to sell using what filter do. We can show a display to a store manager saying, Hey, I want to put a display here. And this is how it looks. They can show it on the phone that Dan just explaining and showing some paper images. So there's a lot of possibilities, >>A lot of improvements to the customer experience. It sounds like, it sounds like adoption is quite high for your folks who are used to 20 year old technology, probably being very, uh, excited that they have a modern app. But talk to me a little bit about the appetite of the organization to continue modernizing the application infrastructure and presuming going from older technology to that 21st century, like you talked about. >>Yeah. So in other parts, we are already modernized some of these. So we have been on the journey for the last four or five years building multiple digital platforms. So one of the example I can give is when COVID hit, there's a lot of disruption for everybody, for the consumers. So they are not able to find the products in the stores, but people are afraid to go to the stores to even buy products. So we reacted very quickly and opened a consumer of a website called snacks or calm, which Pepsi never sold it to the directly. We always go through our stores, but the first time we open the consumer channel and base powered some of it for the backend purpose. So this is not a mobile app, it's just a desktop app, but we already have been on the district has mission journey even before we quickly turned into COVID for the snacks.com. >>And similarly, we are, you are doing this for our retail execution portion of it, um, using this product. So, and then we'll be continuing to do this going forward, or to enable a lot of functionality for, uh, I mean, for all of our sales, as well as, uh, supply chain and other systems, so that we can be more efficient. We can be more elastic saying if there is more demand, our backend should be able to handle all that, uh, which was not the case before extra. Now we built a state of the art backend system on cloud. So there's a lot of transmission, digital transmission going on within PepsiCo. And I'm really proud to be part of this project so that we took this to the next level. And then this is just a start. We can do a lot more, >>Right? This is just the beginning. That sounds like a great transformation for a history company that we all, everybody knows PepsiCo and all of its products. But it sounds like when the pandemic hit, you had the infrastructure in place to be able to pivot quickly to launch that direct to consumer, which of course consumers, patients has been quite thin in the last year and a half. Talk to me a little bit about the impact to the overall organization as a result of being able to, to get more direct with those consumers. >>Yeah. So till now, again, we are, the business model is we sell to the stores and then go to the customer. So we'd never get a direct, uh, sense of what consumer, uh, liking is. I mean, we get through some surveys and stuff, but we don't have a direct channel with the consumer, which this particular product enabled us next.com. So we know the consumer behavior, how they, um, buying patterns, browsing patterns, which ones they like and including with geography. And also we learned a lot from a consumer behavior point of view for the project. And then we kept on enhancing. So one new thing we introduced was called multipack where the consumers can come and make their own market practices. They can say, okay, I need this many of this particular product, this product per I can make that multipack. And we ship them the customized market back. >>And it was such a huge hit that we are not able to even fulfill them so much demand was there for that one. So we had to revamp and then get back. And now it's a huge thing on our snacks that complex. So all of this is possible because we had a digital platform underneath that supports this kind of innovation. So the new business models are just coming to life in within weeks or even few months. And that's what we will be trying to do with the new platform that could billing for this app as well, where we'll bring in a lot of new business models. We have >>Excellent, a lot of, uh, transformation. It sounds like at PepsiCo in the last couple of years, I'd love the customization, that personalization route that you're going. I think that's going to be a huge hit for consumers. And as you said, there's a lot of demand letter. Thank you for joining me today, talking about how you are modernizing the field service and supply chain application, the impact it's making for end users for your customers and for the sales folks. We appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much >>From out of McCullough. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation.

>> (lively music) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got an alumni joining me and a brand new guest to the CUBE please welcome Paul Papas, the Global Managing Partner, for IBM Global Business Services, this is transformation services. Paul, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thanks Lisa great to be here with you today. And Dominique Dubois is here as well. She is the Global Strategy and Offerings Leader in business transformation services or BTS at IBM. Dominique, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, great to be here. So, we're going to be talking about accelerating business transformation with intelligent workflows. We're going to break through all that, but Paul we're going to start with you. Since we last got together with IBM, a lot has changed so much transformation, so much acceleration of transformation. Talk to me from your perspective, how have you seen the way that businesses running change and what some of the changes in the future are going to be? >> Well, you hit on two key words there Lisa and thanks so much for that question. Two key words that you hit on were change and acceleration. And that's exactly what we see. We were seeing this before the pandemic and if anything, with the pandemic did when things started started kind of spreading around the world late or early last year, around January, February timeframe we saw that word acceleration really take hold. Every one of our clients were looking for new ways to accelerate the change that they had already planned to adapt to this new, this new normal or this new abnormal, depending on how you view it. In fact, we did a study recently, an IBV study that's our Institute of Business Value and found that six out of 10 organizations were accelerating all of their transformation initiatives they had already planned. And that's exactly what we're seeing happening right now in all parts of the world and across all industries. This acceleration to transform. >> So, one of the things that we've talked about for years, Paul, before the pandemic was even a thing, is that there was a lot of perceived technical barriers in terms of like the tech maturity for organizations and employees being opposed to change. People obviously it can be a challenge. They're used to doing things the way they are. But as you just said, in that IBV survey, nearly 60% of businesses say we have to accelerate our transformation due to COVID, probably initially to survive and then thrive. Talk to me about some of those, those barriers that were there a little over a year ago and how businesses 60 plus percent of them have moved those out of the way. >> You know at IBM we've got a 109 year history of being a technology innovation company. And the rate of pace of technical change is always increasing. It's something that we love and that we're comfortable with. But the rate and pace of change is always unsettling. And there's always a human element for change. And the human element is always the rate, the rate setter in terms of the amount of change that you can have in an organization. Our former chairman Ginni Rometty, used to say that growth and comfort cannot co-exist. And it's so true because changing is uncomfortable. It's unsettling. It can be, it can be nerve-racking. It can instill fear and fear can be paralyzing in terms of driving change. And what we also see is there's a disconnect, a lot of times and that IBV study that I was referring to before, we saw results coming back where 78% of executives feel that they have provided the training and enablement to help their employees transform to new required skills and new ways of working but only half of the people surveyed felt the same way. Similarly, we saw a disconnect in terms of companies feeling that they're providing the right level of health and wellness support during the pandemic. And only half of the employees responded back they feel that they're getting that level of support. So, the people change aspect of doing a transformation or adapting to new circumstances is always the most critical component and always the hardest component. And when we talk about helping our clients do that in IBM that's our service as organization. That's the organization that Dominique Dubois is representing here today. I'm responsible for business transformation services within our organization. We help our clients adapt using new technologies, transforming the way they work, but also addressing the people change elements that could be so difficult and hitting them head on so that they can make sure that they can survive and thrive in a meaningful and lasting way in this new world. >> One of the hardest things is that cultural transformation regardless of a pandemic. So, I can't imagine I'd love to get one more thing, Paul from you before we head over to Dominique. IBM is on 109 year old organization. Talk to me about the IBM pledge. This is something that came up last year, huge organization massive changes last year, not just the work from home that the mental concerns and issues that people had. What did IBM do like as a grassroots effort that went viral? >> Yeah, so, it's really great. So, when the pandemic started, we all have to shift it, We all have to shift to working from home. And as you mentioned, IBM's 109 year old company, we have over 300,000 employees working in 170 countries. So, we had to move this entire workforce. It's 370,000 humans to working in a new way that many of which have never done before. And when we started experiencing, the minute we did that, within a few weeks, my team and I were talking Dominique is on my team and we were having conversations where we were feeling really exhausted. Just a few weeks into this and it was because we were constantly on Webex, we were constantly connected and we're all used to working really hard. We travel a lot, we're always with our clients. So, it wasn't that, you have a team that is adapting to like working more hours or longer hours, but this was fundamentally different. And we saw that with schools shutting down and lock downs happening in different of the world the home life balance was getting immediately difficult to impossible to deal with. We have people that are taking care of elderly parents, people that are homeschooling children, other personal life situations that everyone had to navigate in the middle of a pandemic locked at home with different restrictions on when you can go out and get things done. So, we got together as a group and we just started talking about how can we help? How can we help make life just a little bit easier for all of our people? And we started writing down some things that we would, we would commit to doing with each other. How we would address each other. And when that gave birth to was what we call the IBM Work From Home Pledge. And it's a set of principles, all grounded in the belief that, if we act this way, we might just be able to make life just a little bit easier for each other and it's grounded in empathy. And there are parts of the Plex that are pledging to be kind. Recognizing that in this new digital world that we're showing up on camera inside of everyone's home. We're guests in each other's homes. So, let's make sure that we act appropriately as guests at each other's home. So, if children run into the frame during the middle of a meeting or dog started barking during the middle of a meeting, just roll with it. Don't call out attention to it. Don't make people feel self-conscious about it. Pledged the support so your fellow IBM by making time for personal needs. So, if someone has to, do homeschooling in the middle of the day, like Dominique's got triplets she's got to do homeschooling in the middle of the day. Block that time off and we will respect that time on your calendar. And just work around it and just deal with it. There are other things like respecting that camera ready time. As someone who's now been on camera every day it feels like for the last 14 months we want to respect the time that people when they have their cameras off. And not pressure them to put their cameras on saying things like, Hey, I can't see you. There's no reason to add more pressure to everyone's life, if someone's camera's off, it's all for a reason. And then other things like pledging to checking on each other, pledging to set boundaries and tend to our own self-care. So, we published that as a group, we just again and we put it on a Slack channel. So it's kind of our communication method inside the company. It was just intended to be for my organization but it started going viral and tens of thousands of IBM members started taking, started taking the pledge and ultimately caught the attention of our CEO and he loved it, shared it with his leadership team, which I'm a part of. And then also then went on LinkedIn and publicly took the pledge as well. Which then also got more excitement and interaction with other companies as well. So, grassroots effort all grounded in showing empathy and helping to make life just a little bit easier for everyone. >> So important, I'm going to look that up and I'm going to tell you as a person who speaks with many tech companies a week. A lot of businesses could take a lead from that and it gets really important and we are inviting each other into our homes and I see you're a big Broadway fan I'll have to ask you that after we wrap (giggles) Dominique I don't know how you're doing any of this with triplets. I only have two dogs (Dominique laughs) but I'd love to know this sense of urgency, that is everywhere you're living it. Paul talked about it with respect to the acceleration of transformation. How from your lens is IBM and IBM helping customers address the urgency, the need to pivot, the need to accelerate, the need to survive and thrive with respect to digital transformation actually getting it done? >> Right, thanks Lisa, so true our clients are really needing to and ready to move with haste. That that sense of urgency can be felt I think across every country, every market, every industry. And so we're really helping our clients accelerate their digital transformations and we do that through something that we call intelligent workflows. And so workflows in and of themselves are basically how organizations get work done. But intelligent workflows are how we infuse; predictive properties, automation, transparency, agility, end to end across a workflow. So, pulling those processes together so they're not solid anymore and infusing. So, simply put we bring intelligent workflows to our clients and it fundamentally reinvents how they're getting work done from a digital perspective, from a predictive perspective, from a transparency perspective. And I think what really stands apart when we deliver this with our clients in partnership with our clients is how it not only delivers value to the bottom line, to the top line it also actually delivers greater value to their employees, to the customers, to the partner to their broader ecosystem. And intelligent workflows are really made up of three core elements. The first is around better utilizing data. So, aggregating, analyzing, getting deeper insight out of data, and then using that insight not just for employees to make better decisions, but actually to support for emerging technologies to leverage. So we talked about AI, automation, IOT, blockchain, all of these technologies require vast amounts of data. And what we're able to bring both on the internal and external source from a data perspective really underpins what these emerging technologies can do. And then the third area is skills. Our skills that we bring to the table, but also our clients deep, deep expertise, partner expertise, expertise from the ecosystem at large and pulling all of that together, is how we're really able to help our clients accelerate their digital transformations because we're helping them shift, from a set of siloed static processes to an end-to-end workflow. We're helping them make fewer predictions based on the past historical data and actually taking more real-time action with real time insights. So, it really is a fundamental shift and how your work is getting done to really being able to provide that emerging technologies, data, deep skills-based end to end workflow. >> That word fundamental has such gravity. and I know we say data has gravity being fundamental in such an incredibly dynamic time is really challenging but I was looking through some of the notes that you guys provided me with. And in terms of what you just talked about, Dominique versus making a change to a silo, the benefits and making changes to a spectrum of integrated processes the values can be huge. In fact, I was reading that changing a single process like billing, for example might deliver up to 20% improved results. But integrating across multiple processes, like billing, collections, organizations can achieve double that up to 40%. And then there's more taking the intelligent workflow across all lead to cash. This was huge. Clients can get 50 to 70% more value from that. So that just shows that fundamental impact that intelligent workflows can make. >> Right, I mean, it really is when we see it really is about unlocking exponential value. So, when you think about crossing end to end workflow but also, really enhancing what clients are doing and what companies are doing today with those exponential technologies from kind of single use the automation POC here and AI application POC here, actually integrating those technologies together and applying them at scale. When I think intelligent workflows I think acceleration. I think exponential value. But I also really think about at scale. Because it's really the ability to apply these technologies the expertise at scale that allows us to start to unlock a lot of that value. >> So let's go over Paul, in the last few minutes that we have here I want to talk about IBM garage and how this is helping clients to really transform those workflows. Talk to me a little bit about what IBM garage is. I know it's not IBM garage band and I know it's been around since before the pandemic but help us understand what that is and how it's delivering value to customers. >> Well, first I'm going to be the first to invite you to join the IBM garage band, Lisa so we'd love to have you >> I'm in. no musical experience required... >> I like to sing, all right I mean (laughs) We're ready, we're ready for. So, let me talk to you about IBM garage and I do want to key on two words that Dominique was mentioning speed and scale. Because that's what our clients are really looking for when they're doing transformations around intelligent workflows. How can you transform at scale, but do that with speed. And that really becomes the critical issue. As Dominique mentioned, there's a lot of companies that can help you do a proof of concept do something in a few weeks that you can test an idea out and have something that's kind of like a throw away piece of work that maybe proves a point or just proves a point. But even if it does prove the point at that point you'd have to restart a new, to try to get something that you could actually scale either in the production technology environment or scale as a change across an organization. And that's where IBM garage comes in. It's all a way of helping our clients co-create, co-execute and then cooperate, innovating at scale. So, we use methods like design thinking inside of IBM we've trained several hundred thousand people on design thinking methods. We use technologies like neural and other things that help our clients co-create in a dynamic environment. And what's amazing for me is that, the cause of the way we were, we were doing work with clients in a garage with using IBM garage in a garage environment before the pandemic. And one of our clients Frito-Lay of North America, is an example where we've helped them innovate at scale and speed using IBM garage over a long period of time. And when the pandemic hit, we in fact were running 11 garages across 11 different workflow areas for them the pandemic hit and everyone was sent home. So, we all instantly overnight had to work from home together with relay. And what was great is that we were able to quickly adapt the garage method to working in a virtual world. To being able to run that same type of innovation and then use that innovation at scale in a virtual world, we did that overnight. And since that time which happened, that happened back in March of last year throughout the pandemic, we've run over 1500 different garage engagements with all of our clients all around the world in a virtual, in a virtual environment. It's just an incredible way, like I said to help our clients innovate at scale. >> That's fantastic, go ahead Dominique. >> Oh, sorry, was just said it's a great example, we partnered with FlightSafety International, they train pilots. And I think a great example of that speed and scale right is in less than 12 weeks due to the garage methodology and the partnership with FlightSafety, we created with them and launched an adaptive learning solution. So, a platform as well as a complete change to their training workflow such that they had personalized kind of real-time next best training for how they train their pilots for simulators. So, reducing their cycle time but also improving the training that their pilots get, which as people who normally travel, it's really important to us and everyone else. So, just a really good example, less than 12 weeks start to start to finish. >> Right, talk about acceleration. Paul, last question for you, we've got about 30 seconds left I know this is an ecosystem effort of IBM, it's ecosystem partners, it's Alliance partners. How are you helping align right partner with the right customer, the right use case? >> Yeah, it's great. And our CEO Arvind Krishna has really ushered in this era where we are all about the open ecosystem here at IBM and working with our ecosystem partners. In our services business we have partnerships with all the major, all the major technology players. We have a 45 year relationship with SAP. We've done more SAP S 400 implementations than anyone in the world. We've got the longest standing consulting relationship with Salesforce, we've got a unique relationship with Adobe, they're only services and technology partner in the ecosystem. And we just recently won three, procedures Partner Awards, with them and most recently we announced a partnership with Celonis which is an incredible process execution software company, process mining software company that's going to help us transform intelligent workflows in an accelerated way, embedded in our garage environment. So, ecosystem is critical to our success but more importantly, it's critical to our client success. We know that no one alone has the answers and no one alone can help anyone change. So, with this open ecosystem approach that we take and global business services and our business transformation services organization, we're able to make sure that we bring our clients the best of everyone's capabilities. Whether it's our technology, partners, our services IBM's own technology capabilities, all in the mix, all orchestrated in service to our client's needs all with the goal of driving superior business outcomes for them. >> And helping those customers in any industry to accelerate their business transformation with those intelligent workloads and a very dynamic time. This is a topic we could keep talking about unfortunately, we are out of time but thank you both for stopping by and sharing with me what's going on with respect to intelligent workflows. How the incremental exponential value it's helping organizations to deliver and all the work that IBM is doing to enable its customers to be thrivers of tomorrow. We appreciate talking to you >> Paul: Thanks Lisa. >> Dominique: Thank you >> For Paul Papas and Dominique Dubois I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of IBM Think the digital event experience. (gentle music)

(lively music) >> From around the globe it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021, the digital event experience. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got an alumni joining me and a brand new guest to the CUBE please welcome Paul Papas, the Global Managing Partner, for IBM Global Business Services, this is transformation services. Paul, welcome back to the virtual CUBE. >> Thanks Lisa great to be here with you today. And Dominique Dubois is here as well. She is the Global Strategy and Offerings Leader in business transformation services or BTS at IBM. Dominique, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, great to be here. So, we're going to be talking about accelerating business transformation with intelligent workflows. We're going to break through all that, but Paul we're going to start with you. Since we last got together with IBM, a lot has changed so much transformation, so much acceleration of transformation. Talk to me from your perspective, how have you seen the way that businesses running change and what some of the changes in the future are going to be? >> Well, you hit on two key words there Lisa and thanks so much for that question. Two key words that you hit on were change and acceleration. And that's exactly what we see. We were seeing this before the pandemic and if anything, with the pandemic did when things started started kind of spreading around the world late or early last year, around January, February timeframe we saw that word acceleration really take hold. Every one of our clients were looking for new ways to accelerate the change that they had already planned to adapt to this new, this new normal or this new abnormal, depending on how you view it. In fact, we did a study recently, an IBV study that's our Institute of Business Value and found that six out of 10 organizations were accelerating all of their transformation initiatives they had already planned. And that's exactly what we're seeing happening right now in all parts of the world and across all industries. This acceleration to transform. >> So, one of the things that we've talked about for years, Paul, before the pandemic was even a thing, is that there was a lot of perceived technical barriers in terms of like the tech maturity for organizations and employees being opposed to change. People obviously it can be a challenge. They're used to doing things the way they are. But as you just said, in that IBV survey, nearly 60% of businesses say we have to accelerate our transformation due to COVID, probably initially to survive and then thrive. Talk to me about some of those, those barriers that were there a little over a year ago and how businesses 60 plus percent of them have moved those out of the way. >> You know at IBM we've got 109 year history of being a technology innovation company. And the rate of pace of technical change is always increasing. It's something that we love and that we're comfortable with. But the rate and pace of change is always unsettling. And there's always a human element for change. And the human element is always the rate, the rate setter in terms of the amount of change that you can have in an organization. Our former chairman Ginni Rometty, used to say that growth and comfort cannot co-exist. And it's so true because changing is uncomfortable. It's unsettling. It can be, it can be nerve-racking. It can instill fear and fear can be paralyzing in terms of driving change. And what we also see is there's a disconnect, a lot of times and that IBV study that I was referring to before, we saw results coming back where 78% of executives feel that they have provided the training and enablement to help their employees transform to new required skills and new ways of working but only half of the people surveyed felt the same way. Similarly, we saw a disconnect in terms of companies feeling that they're providing the right level of health and wellness support during the pandemic. And only half of the employees responded back they feel that they're getting that level of support. So, the people change aspect of may doing a transformation or adapting to new circumstances is always the most critical component and always the hardest component. And when we talk about helping our clients do that in IBM that's our service as organization. That's the organization that Dominique Dubois are representing here today. I'm responsible for business transformation services within our organization. We help our clients adapt using new technologies, transforming the way they work, but also addressing the people change elements that could be so difficult and hitting them head on so that they can make sure that they can survive and thrive in a meaningful and lasting way in this new world. >> One of the hardest things is that cultural transformation regardless of a pandemic. So, I can't imagine I'd love to get one more thing, Paul from you before we head over to Dominique. IBM is on 109 year old organization. Talk to me about the IBM pledge. This is something that came up last year, huge organization massive changes last year, not just the work from home that the mental concerns and issues that people had. What did IBM do like as a grassroots effort that went viral? >> Yeah, so, it's really great. So, when the pandemic started, we all have to shift it, We all have to shift to working from home. And as you mentioned, IBM's 109 year old company, we have over 300,000 employees working in 170 countries. So, we had to move this entire workforce. It's 370,000 humans to working in a new way that many of which have never done before. And when we started experiencing, the minute we did that, within a few weeks, my team and I were talking Dominique is on my team and we were having conversations where we were feeling really exhausted. Just a few weeks into this and it was because we were constantly on Webex, we were constantly connected and we're all used to working really hard. We travel a lot, we're always with our clients. So, it wasn't that, you have a team that is adapting to like working more hours or longer hours, but this was fundamentally different. And we saw that with schools shutting down and lock downs happening in different of the world the home life balance was getting immediately difficult to impossible to deal with. We have people that are taking care of elderly parents, people that are homeschooling children, other personal life situations that everyone had to navigate in the middle of a pandemic locked at home with different restrictions on when you can go out and get things done. So, we got together as a group and we just started talking about how can we help? How can we help make life just a little bit easier for all of our people? And we started writing down some things that we would, we would commit to doing with each other. How we would address each other. And when that gave birth to was what we call the IBM Work From Home Pledge. And it's a set of principles, all grounded in the belief that, if we act this way, we might just be able to make life just a little bit easier for each other and it's grounded in empathy. And there are parts of the Plex that are pledging to be kind. Recognizing that in this new digital world that we're showing up on camera inside of everyone's home. We're guests in each other's homes. So, let's make sure that we act appropriately as guests at each other's home. So, if children run into the frame during the middle of a meeting or dog started barking during the middle of a meeting, just roll with it. Don't call out attention to it. Don't make people feel self-conscious about it. Pledged the support so your fellow IBM by making time for personal needs. So, if someone has to, do homeschooling in the middle of the day, like Dominique's got triplets she's got to do homeschooling in the middle of the day. Block that time off and we will respect that time on your calendar. And just work around it and just deal with it. There are other things like respecting that camera ready time. As someone who's now been on camera every day it feels like for the last 14 months we want to respect the time that people when they have their cameras off. And not pressure them to put their cameras on saying things like, Hey, I can't see you. There's no reason to add more pressure to everyone's life, if someone's camera's off, it's all for a reason. And then other things like pledging to checking on each other, pledging to set boundaries and tend to our own self-care. So, we published that as a group, we just again and we put it on a Slack channel. So it's kind of our communication method inside the company. It was just intended to be for my organization but it started going viral and tens of thousands of IBM members started taking, started taking the pledge and ultimately caught the attention of our CEO and he loved it, shared it with his leadership team, which I'm a part of. And then also then went on LinkedIn and publicly took the pledge as well. Which then also got more excitement and interaction with other companies as well. So, grassroots effort all grounded in showing empathy and helping to make life just a little bit easier for everyone. >> So important, I'm going to look that up and I'm going to tell you as a person who speaks with many tech companies a week. A lot of businesses could take a lead from that and it gets really important and we are inviting each other into our homes and I see you're a big Broadway fan I'll have to ask you that after we wrap (giggles) Dominique I don't know how you're doing any of this with triplets. I only have two dogs (Dominique laughs) but I'd love to know this sense of urgency, that is everywhere you're living it. Paul talked about it with respect to the acceleration of transformation. How from your lens is IBM and IBM helping customers address the urgency, the need to pivot, the need to accelerate, the need to survive and thrive with respect to digital transformation actually getting it done? >> Right, thanks Lisa, so true our clients are really needing to and ready to move with haste. That that sense of urgency can be felt I think across every country, every market, every industry. And so we're really helping our clients accelerate their digital transformations and we do that through something that we call intelligent workflows. And so workflows in and of themselves are basically how organizations get work done. But intelligent workflows are how we infuse; predictive properties, automation, transparency, agility, end to end across a workflow. So, pulling those processes together so they're not solid anymore and infusing. So, simply put we bring intelligent workflows to our clients and it fundamentally reinvents how they're getting work done from a digital perspective, from a predictive perspective, from a transparency perspective. And I think what really stands apart when we deliver this with our clients in partnership with our clients is how it not only delivers value to the bottom line, to the top line it also actually delivers greater value to their employees, to the customers, to the partner to their broader ecosystem. And intelligent workflows are really made up of three core elements. The first is around better utilizing data. So, aggregating, analyzing, getting deeper insight out of data, and then using that insight not just for employees to make better decisions, but actually to support for emerging technologies to leverage. So we talked about AI, automation, IOT, blockchain, all of these technologies require vast amounts of data. And what we're able to bring both on the internal and external source from a data perspective really underpins what these emerging technologies can do. And then the third area is skills. Our skills that we bring to the table, but also our clients deep, deep expertise, partner expertise, expertise from the ecosystem at large and pulling all of that together, is how we're really able to help our clients accelerate their digital transformations because we're helping them shift, from a set of siloed static processes to an end-to-end workflow. We're helping them make fewer predictions based on the past historical data and actually taking more real-time action with real time insights. So, it really is a fundamental shift and how your work is getting done to really being able to provide that emerging technologies, data, deep skills-based end to end workflow. >> That word fundamental has such gravity. and I know we say data has gravity being fundamental in such an incredibly dynamic time is really challenging but I was looking through some of the notes that you guys provided me with. And in terms of what you just talked about, Dominique versus making a change to a silo, the benefits and making changes to a spectrum of integrated processes the values can be huge. In fact, I was reading that changing a single process like billing, for example might deliver up to 20% improved results. But integrating across multiple processes, like billing, collections, organizations can achieve double that up to 40%. And then there's more taking the intelligent workflow across all lead to cash. This was huge. Clients can get 50 to 70% more value from that. So that just shows that fundamental impact that intelligent workflows can make. >> Right, I mean, it really is when we see it really is about unlocking exponential value. So, when you think about crossing end to end workflow but also, really enhancing what clients are doing and what companies are doing today with those exponential technologies from kind of single use the automation POC here and AI application POC here, actually integrating those technologies together and applying them at scale. When I think intelligent workflows I think acceleration. I think exponential value. But I also really think about at scale. Because it's really the ability to apply these technologies the expertise at scale that allows us to start to unlock a lot of that value. >> So let's go over Paul, in the last few minutes that we have here I want to talk about IBM garage and how this is helping clients to really transform those workflows. Talk to me a little bit about what IBM garage is. I know it's not IBM garage band and I know it's been around since before the pandemic but help us understand what that is and how it's delivering value to customers. >> Well, first I'm going to be the first to invite you to join the IBM garage band, Lisa so we'd love to have you >> I'm in. no musical experience required... >> I like to sing, all right I mean (laughs) We're ready, we're ready for. So, let me talk to you about IBM garage and I do want to key on two words that Dominique was mentioning speed and scale. Because that's what our clients are really looking for when they're doing transformations around intelligent workflows. How can you transform at scale, but do that with speed. And that really becomes the critical issue. As Dominique mentioned, there's a lot of companies that can help you do a proof of concept do something in a few weeks that you can test an idea out and have something that's kind of like a throw away piece of work that maybe proves a point or just proves a point. But even if it does prove the point at that point you'd have to restart a new, to try to get something that you could actually scale either in the production technology environment or scale as a change across an organization. And that's where IBM garage comes in. It's all a way of helping our clients co-create, co-execute and then cooperate, innovating at scale. So, we use methods like design thinking inside of IBM we've trained several hundred thousand people on design thinking methods. We use technologies like neural and other things that help our clients co-create in a dynamic environment. And what's amazing for me is that, the cause of the way we were, we were doing work with clients in a garage with using IBM garage in a garage environment before the pandemic. And one of our clients Frito-Lay of North America, is an example where we've helped them innovate at scale and speed using IBM garage over a long period of time. And when the pandemic hit, we in fact were running 11 garages across 11 different workflow areas for them the pandemic hit and everyone was sent home. So, we all instantly overnight had to work from home together with relay. And what was great is that we were able to quickly adapt the garage method to working in a virtual world. To being able to run that same type of innovation and then use that innovation at scale in a virtual world, we did that overnight. And since that time which happened, that happened back in March of last year throughout the pandemic, we've run over 1500 different garage engagements with all of our clients all around the world in a virtual, in a virtual environment. It's just an incredible way, like I said to help our clients innovate at scale. >> That's fantastic, go ahead Dominique. >> Oh, sorry, was just said it's a great example, we partnered with FlightSafety International, they train pilots. And I think a great example of that speed and scale right is in less than 12 weeks due to the garage methodology and the partnership with FlightSafety, we created with them and launched an adaptive learning solution. So, a platform as well as a complete change to their training workflow such that they had personalized kind of real-time next best training for how they train their pilots for simulators. So, reducing their cycle time but also improving the training that their pilots get, which as people who normally travel, it's really important to us and everyone else. So, just a really good example, less than 12 weeks start to start to finish. >> Right, talk about acceleration. Paul, last question for you, we've got about 30 seconds left I know this is an ecosystem effort of IBM, it's ecosystem partners, it's Alliance partners. How are you helping align right partner with the right customer, the right use case? >> Yeah, it's great. And our CEO Arvind Krishna has really ushered in this era where we are all about the open ecosystem here at IBM and working with our ecosystem partners. In our services business we have partnerships with all the major, all the major technology players. We have a 45 year relationship with SAP. We've done more SAP S 400 implementations than anyone in the world. We've got the longest standing consulting relationship with Salesforce, we've got a unique relationship with Adobe, they're only services and technology partner in the ecosystem. And we just recently won three, procedures Partner Awards, with them and most recently we announced a partnership with Celonis which is an incredible process execution software company, process mining software company that's going to help us transform intelligent workflows in an accelerated way, embedded in our garage environment. So, ecosystem is critical to our success but more importantly, it's critical to our client success. We know that no one alone has the answers and no one alone can help anyone change. So, with this open ecosystem approach that we take and global business services and our business transformation services organization, we're able to make sure that we bring our clients the best of everyone's capabilities. Whether it's our technology, partners, our services IBM's own technology capabilities, all in the mix, all orchestrated in service to our client's needs all with the goal of driving superior business outcomes for them. >> And helping those customers in any industry to accelerate their business transformation with those intelligent workloads and a very dynamic time. This is a topic we could keep talking about unfortunately, we are out of time but thank you both for stopping by and sharing with me what's going on with respect to intelligent workflows. How the incremental exponential value it's helping organizations to deliver and all the work that IBM is doing to enable its customers to be thrivers of tomorrow. We appreciate talking to you >> Thanks Lisa. >> Thank you >> For Paul Papas and Dominique Dubois I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE's coverage of IBM Think the digital event experience. (gentle music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with coverage of Yukon and Cloud. Native Con North America. 2020. Virtual Brought to You by Red Hat, The Cloud, Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners Welcome back to the Cube. Virtual coverage of KUB Con Cloud native 2020. It's virtual this year. We're not face to face. Were normally in person where we have great interviews. Everyone's kind of jamming in the hallways, having a good time talking tech, identifying the new projects and knew where So we're not. There were remote. I'm John for your host. We've got two great gas, both Cuba alumni's Chris. And is it chief technology officer of the C and C F Chris, Welcome back. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Awesome. Glad to be here. >>And, of course, another Cube alumni who is in studio. But we haven't had him at a Show Jr store meant executive director of the Fin Ops Foundation. And that's the purpose of this session. A interesting data point we're going to dig into how cloud has been enabling Mawr communities, more networks of practitioners who are still working together, and it's also a success point Chris on the C N C F vision, which has been playing out beautifully. So we're looking forward to digging. Jr. Thanks for coming on. Great to see you. >>Yeah, great to be here. Thanks, John. >>So, first of all, I want to get the facts out there. I think this is really important story that people should pay attention to the Finn Ops Foundation. That J. R. That you're running is really an interesting success point because it's it's not the c n c f. Okay. It's a practitioner that builds on cloud. Your experience in community you had is doing specific things that they're I won't say narrow but specific toe a certain fintech things. But it's really about the success of Cloud. Can you explain and and layout for take a minute to explain What is the fin Ops foundation and has it relate to see NCF? >>Yeah, definitely. So you know, if you think about this, the shift that we've had to companies deploying primarily in cloud, whether it be containers a ciencia focuses on or traditional infrastructure. The thing that typically people focus on right is the technology and innovation and speed to market in all those areas. But invariably companies hit this. We'd like to call the spend panic moment where they realize they're They're initially spending much more than they expected. But more importantly, they don't really have the processes in place or the people or the tools to do things like fully, you know, understand where their costs are going to look at how to optimize those to operate that in their organizations. And so the foundation pinups foundation eyes really focused on, uh, the people in practitioners who are in organizations doing cloud financial management, which is, you know, being those who drive this accountability of this variable spin model that's existed. So we were partnering very closely with, uh, see NCF. And we're now actually part of the Linux Foundation as of a few months ago, Uh, and you know, just to kind of put into context how that you kind of Iraq together, whereas, you know, CNC s very focused on open source coordinative projects, you know, For example, Spotify just launched their backstage cloud called Management Tool into CFCF Spotify folks, in our end, are working on the best practices around the cloud financial management that standards to go along with that. So we're there to help, you know, define this sort of cultural transformation, which is a shift to now. Engineers happen to think about costs as they never did before. On finance, people happen to partner with technology teams at the speed of cloud, and, you know executives happen to make trade off decisions and really change the way that they operate the business. With this variable page ago, engineers have all the access to spend the money in Cloud Model. >>Hey, blank check for engineers who doesn't like that rain that in its like shift left for security. And now you've got to deal with the financial Finn ops. It's really important. It's super point, Chris. In all seriousness. Putting kidding aside, this is exactly the kind of thing you see with open sores. You're seeing things like shift left, where you wanna have security baked in. You know what Jr is done in a fabulous job with his community now part of Linux Foundation scaling up, there's important things to nail down that is specific to that domain that are related to cloud. What's your thoughts on this? Because you're seeing it play out. >>Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I talked to a lot of our end user members and companies that have been adopting Cloud Native and I have lots of friends that run, you know, cloud infrastructure at companies. And Justus Jr said, You know, eventually there's been a lot of success and cognitive and want to start using a lot of things. Your bills are a little bit more higher than you expect. You actually have trouble figuring out, you know, kind of who's using what because, you know, let's be honest. A lot of the clouds have built amazing services. But let's say the financial management and cost management accounting tools charge back is not really built in well. And so I kind of noticed this this issue where it's like, great everyone's using all these services. Everything is great, But costs are a little bit confusing, hard to manage and, you know, you know, scientifically, you know, I ran into, you know, Jr and his community out there because my community was having a need of like, you know, there's just not good tools, standards, no practices out there. And, you know, the Finau Foundation was working on these kind of great things. So we started definitely found a way to kind of work together and be under the same umbrella foundation, you know, under the under Linux Foundation. In my personal opinion, I see more and more standards and tools to be created in this space. You know, there's, you know, very few specifications or standards and trying to get cost, you know, data out of different clouds and tools out there, I predict, Ah, lot more work is going to be done. Um, in this space, whether it's done and defendants foundation itself, CNC f, I think will probably be, uh, collaboration amongst communities. Can I truly figure this out? So, uh, engineers have any easier understanding of, you know, if I spent up the service or experiment? How much is this actually going to potentially impact the cost of things and and for a while, You know, uh, engineers just don't think about this. When I was at Twitter, we spot up services all time without really care about cost on, and that's happening a lot of small companies now, which don't necessarily have as a big bucket. So I'm excited about the space. I think you're gonna see a huge amount of focus on cloud financial management drops in the near future. >>Chris, thanks for that great insight. I think you've got a great perspective. You know, in some cases, it's a fast and loose environment. Like Twitter. You mentioned you've got kind of a blank check and the rocket ships going. But, Jr, this brings up to kind of points. This kind of like the whole code side of it. The software piece where people are building code, but also this the human error. I mean, we were playing with clubs, so we have a big media cloud and Amazon and we left there. One of the buckets open on the switches and elemental. We're getting charged. Massive amounts for us cash were like, Wait a minute, not even using this thing. We used it once, and it left it open. It was like the water was flowing through the pipes and charging us. So you know, this human error is throwing the wrong switch. I mean, it was simply one configuration error, in some cases, just more about planning and thinking about prototypes. >>Yeah. I mean, so take what your experience there. Waas and multiply by 1000 development teams in a big organization who all have access to cloud. And then, you know, it's it's and this isn't really about a set of new technologies. It's about a new set of processes and a cultural change, as Chris mentioned, you know, engineers now thinking about cost and this being a whole new efficiency metric for them to manage, right? You know, finance teams now see this world where it's like tomorrow. The cost could go three x the next day they could go down. You've got, you know, things spending up by the second. So there's a whole set of cross functional, and that's the majority of the work that are members do is really around. How do we get these cross functional teams working together? How do we get you know, each team up leveled on what they need, understand with cloud? Because not only is it, you know, highly variable, but it's highly decentralized now, and we're seeing, you know, cloud hit. These sort of material spend levels where you know, the big, big cloud spenders out there spending, you know, high nine figures in some cases you know, in cloud and it's this material for their for their businesses. >>And let's just let's be honest. Here is like Clouds, for the most part, don't really have a huge incentive in offering limits and so on. It's just, you know, like, hey, the more usage that the better And hopefully getting a group of practitioners in real figures. Well, holy put pressure to build better tools and services in this area. I think actually it is happening. I think Jared could correct me if wrong. I think AWS recently announced a feature where I think it's finally like quotas, you know, enabled, you know, you have introducing quotas now for and building limits at some level, which, you know, I think it's 2020 Thank you know, >>just to push back a little bit in support of our friends, you ask Google this company, you know, for a long time doing this work, we were worried that the cloud would be like, What are you doing? Are you trying to get our trying to minimize commitments and you know the dirty secret of this type of work? And I were just talking a bunch of practitioners today is that cloud spend never really goes down. When you do this work, you actually end up spending more because you know you're more comfortable with the efficiency that you're getting, and your CEO is like, let's move more workloads over. But let's accelerate. Let's let's do Maurin Cloud goes out more data centers. And so the cloud providers air actually largely incentivized to say, Yeah, we want people to be officially don't understand this And so it's been a great collaboration with those companies. As you said, you know, aws, Google, that you're certainly really focused in this area and ship more features and more data for you. It's >>really about getting smart. I mean, you know, they no, >>you could >>do it. I mean, remember the old browser days you could switch the default search engine through 10 menus. You could certainly find the way if you really wanted to dig in and make policy a simple abstraction layer feature, which is really a no brainer thing. So I think getting smarter is the right message. I want to get into the synergy Chris, between this this trend, because I think this points to, um kind of what actually happened here if you look at it at least from my perspective and correct me if I'm wrong. But you had jr had a community of practitioners who was sharing information. Sounds like open source. They're talking and sharing, you know? Hey, don't throw that switch. Do This is the best practice. Um, that's what open communities do. But now you're getting into software. You have to embed cost management into everything, just like security I mentioned earlier. So this trend, I think if you kind of connect the dots is gonna happen in other areas on this is really the synergy. Um, I getting that right with CNC >>f eso The way I see it is, and I dream of a future where developers, as they develop software, will be able to have some insight almost immediately off how much potential, you know, cost or impact. They'll have, you know, on maybe a new service or spinning up or potentially earlier in the development cycle saying, Hey, maybe you're not doing this in a way that is efficient. Maybe you something else. Just having that feedback loop. Ah lot. You know, closer to Deb time than you know a couple weeks out. Something crazy happens all of a sudden you notice, You know, based on you know, your phase or financial folks reaching out to you saying, Hey, what's going on here? This is a little bit insane. So I think what we'll see is, as you know, practitioners and you know, Jr spinoffs, foundation community, you know, get together share practices. A lot of them, you know, just as we saw on sense. Yeah, kind of build their own tools, models, abstractions. And, you know, they're starting to share these things. And once you start sharing these things, you end up with a you know, a dozen tools. Eventually, you know, sharing, you know, knowledge sharing, code sharing, you know, specifications. Sharing happens Eventually, things kind of, you know, become de facto tools and standards. And I think we'll see that, you know, transition in the thin ops community over the next 12 to 4 months. You know, very soon in my thing. I think that's kind of where I see things going, >>Jr. This really kind of also puts a riel, you know, spotlight and illustrates the whole developer. First cliche. I mean, it's really not a cliche. It's It's happening. Developers first, when you start getting into the calculations of our oi, which is the number one C level question is Hey, what's the are aware of this problem Project or I won't say cover your ass. But I mean, if someone kind of does a project that it breaks the bank or causes a, you know, financial problem, you know, someone gets pulled out to the back would shed. So, you know, here you're you're balancing both ends of the spectrum, you know, risk management on one side, and you've got return on investment on the other. Is that coming out from the conversation where you guys just in the early stages, I could almost imagine that this is a beautiful tailwind for you? These thes trends, >>Yeah. I mean, if you think about the work that we're doing in our practice you're doing, it's not about saving money. It's about making money because you actually want empower those engineers to be the innovation engines in the organization to deliver faster to ship faster. At the same time, they now can have, you know, tangible financial roo impacts on the business. So it's a new up leveling skill for them. But then it's also, I think, to Christmas point of, you know, people seeing this stuff more quickly. You know what the model looks like when it's really great is that engineers get near real time visibility into the impact of their change is on the business, and they can start to have conversations with the business or with their finance partners about Okay, you know, if you want me to move fast, I could move fast, But it's gonna cost this if you want me to optimize the cost. I could do that or I can optimize performance. And there's actually, you know, deeper are like conversation the candidate up. >>Now I know a lot of people who watch the Cube always share with me privately and Chris, you got great vision on this. We talked many times about it. We're learning a lot, and the developers are on the front lines and, you know, a lot of them don't have MBAs and, you know they're not in the business, but they can learn quick. If you can code, you can learn business. So, you know, I want you to take a minute Jr and share some, um, educational knowledge to developers were out there who have to sit in these meetings and have to say, Hey, I got to justify this project. Buy versus build. I need to learn all that in business school when I had to see s degree and got my MBA, so I kind of blended it together. But could you share what the community is doing and saying, How does that engineer sit in the meeting and defend or justify, or you some of the best practices what's coming out of the foundation? >>Yeah, I mean, and we're looking at first what a core principles that the whole organization used to line around. And then for each persona, like engineers, what they need to know. So I mean, first and foremost, it's It's about collaboration, you know, with their partners andan starting to get to that world where you're thinking about your use of cloud from a business value driver, right? Like, what is the impact of this? The critical part of that? Those early decentralization where you know, now you've got everybody basically taking ownership for their cloud usage. So for engineers, it's yes, we get that information in front of us quickly. But now we have a new efficiency metric. And engineers don't like inefficiency, right? They want to write fishing code. They wanna have efficient outcomes. Um, at the same time, those engineers need to now, you know, have ah, we call it, call it a common lexicon. Or for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, folks. Ah, Babel fish that needs to be developed between these teams. So a lot of the conversations with engineers right now is in the foundation is okay. What What financial terms do I need to understand? To have meaningful conversations about Op X and Capex? And what I'm going to make a commitment to a cloud provider like a committed use discount, Google or reserved instance or savings Planet AWS. You know, Is it okay for me to make that? What? How does that impact our, you know, cost of capital. And then and then once I make that, how do I ensure that I could work with those teams to get that allocated and accounted? The right area is not just for charge back purposes, but also so that my teams can see my portion of the estate, right? And they were having the flip side of that conversation with all the finance folks of like, You need to understand how the variable cloud, you know, model works. And you need to understand what these things mean and how they impact the business. And then all that's coming together. And to the point of like, how we're working with C and C f you know, into best practices White papers, you know, training Siri's etcetera, sets of KP eyes and capabilities. Onda. All these problems have been around for years, and I wouldn't say they're solved. But the knowledge is out there were pulling it together. The new level that we're trying to talk with the NCF is okay. In the old world of Cloud, you had 1 to 1 use of a resource. You're running a thing on an instance in the new world, you're running in containers and that, you know, cluster may have lots of pods and name spaces, things inside of it that may be doing lots of different workloads, and you can no longer allocate. I've got this easy to instance and this storage to this thing it's now split up and very ephemeral. And it is a whole new layer of virtualization on top of virtual ization that we didn't have to deal with before. >>And you've got multiple cloud. I'll throw that in there, just make another dimension on it. Chris, tie this together cause this is nice energy to scale up what he's built with the community now, part of the Linux Foundation. This fits nicely into your vision, you know, perfectly. >>Yeah, no, 100% like, you know, so little foundation. You know, as you're well, well aware, is just a federation of open source foundations of groups working together to share knowledge. So it definitely fits in kind of the little foundation mission of, you know, building the largest share technology investment for, you know, humankind. So definitely good there with my kind of C and C f c T o hat, you know, on is, you know, I want to make sure that you know, you know my community and and, you know, the community of cloud native has access and, you know, knowledge about modern. You know, cloud financial management practices out there. If you look at some of the new and upcoming projects in ciencia things like, you know, you know, backstage, which came out of Spotify. They're starting to add functionality that, you know, you know, originally backstage kind of started out as this, you know, everyone builds their own service catalog to go catalog, and you know who owns what and, you know and all that goodness and developers used it. And eventually what happened is they started to add cost, you know, metrics to each of these services and so on. So it surfaces things a little bit closer, you know, a depth time. So my whole goal is to, you know, take some of these great, you know, practices and potential tools that were being built by this wonderful spinoffs community and trying to bring it into the project. You know, front inside of CNC F. So having more projects either exposed, you know, useful. You know, Finn, ops related metrics or, you know, be able to, you know, uh, you know, tool themselves to quickly be able to get useful metrics that could be used by thin ox practitioners out there. That's my kind of goal. And, you know, I just love seeing two communities, uh, come together to improve, improve the state of the world. >>It's just a great vision, and it's needed so and again. It's not about saving money. Certainly does that if you play it right, but it's about growth and people. You need better instrumentation. You need better data. You've got cloud scale. Why not do something there, right? >>Absolutely. It's just maturity after the day because, you know, a lot of engineers, you know, they just love this whole like, you know, rental model just uses many Resource is they want, you know, without even thinking about just basic, you know, metrics in terms of, you know, how many idle instances do I have out there and so, like, people just don't think about that. They think about getting the work done, getting the job done. And if they anything we do to kind of make them think a little bit earlier about costs and impact efficiency, charge back, you know, I think the better the world isn't Honestly, you know, I do see this to me. It's It's almost like, you know, with my hippie hat on. It's like Stephen Green or for the more efficient we are. You know, the better the world off cloud is coming. Can you grow? But we need to be more efficient and careful about the resource is that we use in sentencing >>and certainly with the pandemic, people are virtually you wanted mental health, too. I mean, if people gonna be pulling their hair out, worrying about dollars and cents at scale, I mean, people are gonna be freaking out and you're in meetings justifying why you did things. I mean, that's a time waster, right? I mean, you know, talking about wasting time. >>I have a lot of friends who, you know, run infrastructure at companies. And there's a lot of you know, some companies have been, you know, blessed during this, you know, crazy time with usage. But there is a kind of laser focused on understanding costs and so on and you not be. Do not believe how difficult it is sometimes even just to get, you know, reporting out of these systems, especially if you're using, you know, multiple clouds and multiple services across them. It's not. It's non trivial. And, you know, Jared could speak to this, But, you know, a lot of this world runs in like terrible spreadsheets, right and in versus kind of, you know, nice automated tools with potential, a p I. So there's a lot of this stuff. It's just done sadly in spreadsheets. >>Yeah, salute the flag toe. One standard to rally around us. We see this all the time Jr and emerging inflection points. No de facto kind of things develop. Kubernetes took that track. That was great. What's your take on what he just said? I mean, this is a critical path item for people from all around. >>Yeah, and it's It's really like becoming this bigger and bigger data problem is well, because if you look at the way the clouds are building, they're building per seconds and and down to the very fine grain detail, you know, or functions and and service. And that's amazing for being able to have accountability. But also you get people with at the end of the month of 300 gigabyte billing files, with hundreds of millions of rows and columns attached. So, you know, that's where we do see you companies come together. So yeah, it is a spreadsheet problem, but you can now no longer open your bill in a spreadsheet because it's too big. Eso you know, there's the native tools are doing a lot of work, you know, as you mentioned, you know, AWS and Azure Google shipping a lot. There's there's great, you know, management platforms out there. They're doing work in this area, you know, there's there's people trying to build their own open source the things like Chris was talking about as well. But really, at the end of the day like this, this is This is not a technology. Changes is sort of a cultural shift internally, and it's It's a lot like the like, you know, move from data center to cloud or like waterfall to Dev ops. It's It's a shift in how we're managing, you know, the finances of the money in the business and bringing these groups together. So it it takes time and it takes involvement. I'm also amazed I look like the job titles of the people who are plugged into the Phenoms Foundation and they range from like principal engineers to tech procurement. Thio you know, product leaders to C. T. O. S. And these people are now coming together in the classic to get a seat at the table right toe, Have these conversations and talk about not How do we reduce, you know, cost in the old eighties world. But how do we work together to be more quickly to innovate, to take advantage of these cognitive technologies so that we could be more competitive? Especially now >>it's automation. I mean, all these things are at play. It's about software. I mean, software defined operations is clearly the trend we've been covering. You guys been riding the wave cloud Native actually is so important in all these modern APS, and it applies to almost every aspect of stacks, so makes total sense. Great vision. Um, Chris props to you for that, Jr. Congratulations on a great community, Jerry. I'll give you the final word. Put a plug in for the folks watching on the fin ops Foundation where you're at. What are you looking to do? You adding people, What's your objectives? Take a minute to give the plug? >>Yeah, definitely. We were in open source community, which means we thrive on people contributing inputs. You know, we've got now almost 3000 practitioner members, which is up from 1500 just this this summer on You know, we're looking for those who have either an interesting need to plug into are checked advisory council to help define standards as part of this event, The cognitive gone we're launching Ah, white paper on kubernetes. Uh, and how to do confidential management for it, which was a collaborative effort of a few dozen of our practitioners, as well as our vendor members from VM Ware and Google and APP Thio and a bunch of others who have come together to basically defined how to do this. Well, and, you know, we're looking for folks to plug into that, you know, because at the end of the day, this is about everybody sort of up leveling their skills and knowledge and, you know, the knowledge is out there, nobody's head, and we're focused on how toe drive. Ah, you know, a central collection of that be the central community for it. You enable the people doing this work to get better their jobs and, you know, contribute more of their companies. So I invite you to join us. You know, if your practitioner ITT's Frito, get in there and plug into all the bits and there's great slack interaction channels where people are talking about kubernetes or pinups kubernetes or I need to be asked Google or where we want to go. So I hope you consider joining in the community and join the conversation. >>Thanks for doing that, Chris. Good vision. Thanks for being part of the segment. And, as always, C N C F. This is an enablement model. You throw out the soil, but the 1000 flowers bloom. You don't know what's going to come out of it. You know, new standards, new communities, new vendors, new companies, some entrepreneur Mike jump in this thing and say, Hey, I'm gonna build a better tool. >>Love it. >>You never know. Right? So thanks so much for you guys for coming in. Thanks for the insight. Appreciate. >>Thanks so much, John. >>Thank you for having us. >>Okay. I'm John Furry, the host of the Cube covering Coop Con Cloud, Native Con 2020 with virtual This year, we wish we could be there face to face, but it's cute. Virtual. Thanks for watching

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's the theCUBE covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Valanti and welcome back to the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience. This is the afterglow, the after thoughts, the post halo effect. Mani Dasgupta is here. She's the Vice President of Brand and Product Marketing at IBM. Great to see you again, thanks for coming back on Mani. >> Thank you Dave, it's fantastic to be here after Think which has been super successful for us, so excited to have this chat. >> You know it's really nice, one of the silver linings of these digital events is you can actually have these kinds of conversations in an afterglow, so I want to get right into it. Mark Foster kind of set things up for the division and the service, he talked about a lot of customers. He talked about the cognitive enterprise, and he gave really three sort of arcs of his content discussion. One was the market making platforms, the second was intelligent work flows, and the third is the whole enterprise experience in humanity and he tied it in to the whole COVID-19 pandemic. I wonder if you could give us your thoughts, and maybe an example? >> Sure, absolutely, sure can. You know the cognitive enterprise is a framework that businesses can adapt as they go on forward with their business transformation journey. The market making platform is in simple terms, its how do you put yourself in the route for growth? Do you need to look for new customers, do you need to look for new markets? What's your competitive advantage? Build a platform, or create a platform which signifies competitive advantage for you. So that's the first piece of it. The second piece of it pertains to the operations of the company. How well are you run? How efficient are you? How effective are your processes? How have you been able to apply the latest and greatest in technologies? Edge, 5G, automation, artificial intelligence. How are you able to apply those technologies to make your processes work better for you? So that's the second big piece. And the third piece is keeping your customers at the core of whatever you do. So the experience of the customers, the updated and newer demands of the customers. How do you address that with the human at the center of it, right? The empathy that I was talking about when we spoke last, before and during Think. It's truly important especially in these times, every company is trying to figure out, in this scenario, how do they keep their business on the growth track? And the cognitive enterprise framework helps them on this journey. >> Was there an example that came out of Think that you can point to that is reflective of this? >> Absolutely, there were actually three great case studies that clients and colleagues who joined us during Think, we had the CEO of Yara, we had Shell and we had Frito Lay. A quick example is Frito Lay, and I bring them up because this is a brand that everybody recognizes, in fact they are now in 94% of all US households. And these are name brands like your chips, especially when we are all stuck at home during this pandemic they are a name that quite often comes to mind, Frito Lay. So a good example of what they are having to deal with. They haven't changed their transformation trajectory, they have sped it up. They have just become way more agile, teams that were in different locations are now all near shore. If you think about this scenario right now, everybody is working on Webex, everybody is getting distributed agile to work, so everybody, nobody is at a disadvantage because they are somewhere in India or they are somewhere in Mexico, or they are somewhere in the US, they are all together right now working together on the same digital platform. So actually everybody's near shore. So they have sped up their direct to consumer channel, in the past one month they have been able to quickly pivot and bring snacks.com to people, everybody across the US, that's a very good example of how you can apply the changes around you to your advantage, and make sure that this contributes to the growth and success of their business, and we had Frito join us live during Think, if you want to see it you can go live to our, now on our on demand platform and watch them. >> One of the things that Mark Foster mentioned in his remarks was that a lot of executives might have been thinking prior to COVID that they wanted to shake things up a little bit. But it's risky, you know they're kind of reticent to do that well, things have been shaken up. And now they've got you know the perfect reason to disrupt their own business. And organizations have been very tactical, focus on the customer, really trying to keep the lights on, managing cash, et cetera, but as we start to come out of this, they're beginning to think of the more midterm impacts, they're rethinking the ideal customer profile, and the value proposition in this new reality. So how should customers think about getting started on this journey of the cognitive enterprise if they haven't started already? >> You know it's, the good thing is the technology right now is available to us, even if people want to get started they can do it right now. One of the ways that we have been advising our clients to get started who haven't get started this journey, is to come together in a distributed agile framework, what we call the IBM Garage our Co-Creation Workshop, put the customer at the center of it and create an empathy map. Around what is the problem that we are trying to solve? What's the most important thing that that particular business is trying to solve? And for every business it may be a different answer, right? And so it's not prescriptive, its a place where you can come and lay out the cards on the table and figure out what's the right next step for your business, and then we can use the same model to unpack the problem into solvable components and apply technology to very quickly show results. The beauty of this is not just an MVP, this is actually solving real world problems, and it is doing it at global scale. That's the beauty of it and I think that's where we should start. >> You know a lot of these big events, the big physical events, of course we love them it's something theCUBE has been doing for 10 years, but the disappointing thing is oftentimes after the event everybody disappears, they go back to work and it's sort of forgotten. The great thing about these digital events is you can kind of continue the discussion, not unlike what we're doing now, but also you have these Think Summits, and you're going to be connecting the dots in the thread from Think all the way through until this thing ends and even beyond I would predict, that digital is here to stay, at least an event standpoint, and a hybrid, and other businesses. So give us the update on the Think Summits, how do we get more information, what are they all about? >> Absolutely, for more information is always available on our on demand platforms, so you can go onto IBM.com/think, but what you said Dave is so important. That this is not a one and done, we want to keep the conversations running, we want to keep engaging with everybody who has come last week to have an engaging discussion with us, we will continue this in June, in Europe, in different cities we have a number of Think Summits. This will be followed with other Think Summits across the globe. Now as IBM we feel we have a responsibility not just that we create content and thought leadership that is consumed by millions of people across the globe, we do it in a way that is global. So we want to make sure that you and I today are talking in English, that we are able to have our colleagues in China are able to have the same conversation in the language that they prefer, and so in Japan and so on and so forth, IBM being the truly global company that we are, we want to make sure that the conversations also have nuances that are impacting these countries in real time, in the situation that we are in, not all companies are in the same space in the curve, some are recovering, some are bouncing back, some are just getting into this scenario that's all around us. So the remedy and the routes that business will take, is also slightly different. So we want to make sure we are very customized, we want to make sure we are really very relevant to that audience. So follow us on the Think Summits across the globe, as the new dates are keeping on newer dates are getting announced on the Think platform, so that's ready to go. The one last thing I would also say Dave, is that at this time what's very important is that not all tech is created equal, and not all companies are created equal. What's the cost of bad advice and so I think it's very important to be mindful of who you engage with. And make sure that we are not taken advantage of in these kind of scenarios. Be very mindful of how how well your partner understands your business, how well your partner understands what could go wrong. And plan for it, and not just show but be there with your clients, with your customers throughout the journey, and take them back to the path of growth. >> Yeah that whole notion of business resilience and not only as a defensive move, but also something that you can lean into, really try to grow your business, there's a lot of learning going on, a lot of great content on the IBM Think Digital Experience site. Of course theCUBE.net. Mani, thanks so much for coming back on, and breaking down IBM Think, and giving us a forward look to the Think Summits. Great to have you. >> Absolutely my pleasure Dave, thank you. >> And thank you for watching everybody, this is Dave Valanti for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> Hello, everyone. This is a special presentation of the Cube. We're here in London at eight of us, one of eight of US locations in London. My name is Dave Volante and the Q We go, we'd like to go out to the events. We extract a signal from the noise and we've been following the ascendancy of a ws public sector from its early days. If you go back to two thousand thirteen, there was a significant moment in the history of eight of us where it won CIA contract a very large contract. CIA. It was contested by idea. My bm was used to kind of the what sometimes called the old guard the legacy companies used to selling into the government big, big contracts. And here comes this start up essentially eight of us taking away government business with CIA no less huge, huge contract. Well, IBM contested it. Judge Wheeler ruled against IBM for eight of us. And when reading that ruling, it was clear that the eight of US platform was superior to the IBM platform. He laid out the essentially the components of the R F P and the line by line and showed that a ws was the winner and virtually all of the line items. I think there was parody and won the reason why that was so important. It was that there were several factors there. One, It was a major milestone event. No, only Frito. Eight of us. But for cloud in general, if you think about security Ah, CIA, obviously very security conscious. It was the recognition that cloud actually could be more secure than on premises infrastructure. So the government was actually one of the first to kind of realise that and lean into that as a side effect, IBM had to go out and spend two billion dollars on soft layer toe actually compete in the cloud market Plys. So you had all these ripple effects Fast forward today to two thousand nineteen. You have the jet icon to contract a joint enterprise defense initiative. It's a ten billion dollar contract. A ws is in the lead for that contract. Oracle again another old Guard company has contested. And when you look through when when a company contests these bids, a whole lot of public information comes out. What? What the information suggested was that a single cloud the D o d determine that a single cloud was more secure, less complex and more cost effective. And so Oracle contested the the likelihood of an award to a single company because government contracts usually are awarded to multiple vendors. But in this case, because it's so critical tohave the data in one place so that they can serve the field better and responded the field better, the D o. D decided to use a single cloud. So oracles, you know, throwing off all rights of muck into the ring. Ah, basically asking the General Accountability Office to look at it. They did, Ggo said. If we're going to go with the D. O. D s decision, the D. O. D itself did an internal investigation. Now it's narrowed down to two vendors eight of us and Microsoft, and we believe that eight of us is the leading contender. Why is that? It's because eight of us says the most services. It's the most advanced, the highest levels of security and certifications within the government that are necessary to win these types of contracts. Why don't I spend so much time on these things? There's a two milestone events, the CIA contract in two thousand thirteen and what will soon to be the Jet I contract in two thousand nineteen. And what we're seeing is Amazon Web services, a thirty billion dollars run rate company growing at forty plus percent per annum. It's just a massive flywheel effect that we always talk about on the Cube. So we're here in London because we wanted to see how the public sector activities of Amazon are translating into the European markets. So we're here at a special public sector mini summit, if you will. There's a healthcare predate going on. This is ahead of the eight of US London summit, and we're siphoning off a number of the practitioners in and and startups software companies. Eight of US partners in the health care industry, as well as a WS executives particularly focused on the public sector today. So we're doing this sort of. We followed the career of Teresa Carlson for a number of years, seen the ascendancy of a ws public sector. We've covered ah, public sector summit in D. C. We flew to Bahrain last year. John Fairy of my business partner did the Bahrain summit. Bahrain was the first country in the Middle East to declare cloud first. So ah, critical location in the Middle East and you're seeing it now. Europe across a number of industries, obviously n hs than Ethan's. National Health Service is a very prominent in in the UK in a in a big consumer of services all kinds of startups and other software companies trying to sell and helped transform The N H s N hs has ah put forth a half a billion dollars nearly a half a billion dollar pound initiative on modernization. Ah, lot of that modernization is evolving the cloud. So the cube is here. We're trying to peel back the onion, understand what's going on here. Who were the winners? Who was going to get affected? Practitioners of startups, CEOs, nonprofit organizations, NGOs, executives from a ws and across the industry. So we'LL be here. We have three events this week in Ah in London here today at eight of US headquarters in London. Ah, tonight we have an impact investor event and then tomorrow we're at the eight of us Summit in AA in London at the XL Center. So keep it right here. Watch this channel. Check out silicon angle dot com For all the news, check out the cube dot net, which is where we host all these videos. And of course, we could bond downward for all the research. So thank you for watching and keep it right there. And you're watching the Cube this day, Volante.